New in PJ Media:
Longtime victims of the far-left smear machine known as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), as well as veteran SPLC watchers, will remember the name Mark Potok. Potok was for many years practically the public face of the SPLC, and for good reason: he was one of its most passionate, self-righteous, sinister, and ideologically rigid apparatchiks. Potok left the SPLC years ago but continued working to defame and destroy foes of the left. Now, however, oddly enough, he seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.
The SPLC, which dogged decent conservative and patriotic individuals and groups (including me) for years, has crashed and burned, and turns out to have been artificially creating the “hate” it then bilked its donors for money to fight. In light of its spectacular fall, I’ve been thinking about Potok these days, and thought I’d reach out to him and see if I could get an interview.
I didn’t really think he would open up to one of his longtime targets and tell the world what he thinks about the mess the SPLC has now been revealed to be. But I didn’t expect to find that the formerly ubiquitous “anti-hate” crusader has just vanished like the morning dew. Gee, does he have something to hide?
Potok and I go way back. Here he is in a 2015 interview denouncing me for my efforts with Pamela Geller to stop the construction of a planned 16-story victory mosque at Ground Zero in New York City. True to form, Potok lies brazenly in this interview, claiming that the planned building was “neither at Ground Zero, nor a mosque,” when it was very much both.
Potok also showed up at my website, jihadwatch.org, and left taunting, sneering comments (which unfortunately have not survived) about how we were “spreading hate” by opposing jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women. The SPLC, of course, had hundreds of millions of dollars and we were (and are) just scraping by, so he could defame us to his heart’s content.
His heart was apparently contented with a lot of defamation. He once described the SPLC’s enduring ethos in arresting terms: “We see this [as a] political struggle. We’re not trying to change anybody’s mind. We’re trying to wreck the groups. We’re trying to destroy them. Not to send them to prison unfairly or to take their free speech rights away, but as a political matter to destroy them.”
There is more. Read the rest here.
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